


Island of Fire

by esama



Series: Island of Fire [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, Dragons, Epistolary, Gen, Oral History, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-09 04:41:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3236603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The founding of a wizarding nation in a world of dragons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Deutsch available: [Island of Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7906663) by [johari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/johari/pseuds/johari)



> Proofread by Tsuyuhime and Darlene

There were wings in the air.

That is what I remember the most clearly – the spread of dragon wings over the castle. Not the fire, even though that is probably what the others remember the best. The Forbidden Forest, set ablaze against the night sky. Why they decided to hold the event at night, I don't know. It didn't make sense then, and it doesn't make sense now. Everything was dark, and yes, the fires were very impressive. But all I remember is the wings.

You couldn't see them. Because it _was_ dark, too dark to see the dragons unless they breathed fire. So you could just hear them, the sound of them, the beat of their wings. There's no way to really describe what a dragon in flight sounds like. Their wings don't sound like bird wings, nor do they sound like sails. There is no way to describe it that doesn't do it an injustice. The beat of dragon wings sounds like the beat of dragon wings.

And I heard it, above me, whenever a dragon flew overhead. And just like the sound, there is no real way to describe the sheer terror of it – to have it above you, that sound, and not being able to _see_ it. Nothing but flashes of figures and gleams of light against scale and horn and then it was gone and you couldn't tell where it had gone, where it would come from next.

They circled above us for maybe two minutes – two of the most horrible minutes of my life. These massive, predatory shadows against the dark night sky – and the sound.

Then, _then…_ everything was on fire.

_\- Lavender Brown_

 

* * *

 

 

I've seen a forest fire once, on a holiday trip to the United States – my dad and I were camping in this nature reserve when some idiot started a fire even though there was a drought. We were driven out of there by the muggle firemen, but we got a good look at the fire before that.

Seeing the Forbidden Forest on fire was _nothing_ like that.

Ron's brother told us later that it's because of the dragon fire. Well, there were other things too, and not just the fire. Especially with Chinese Fireballs. They're called that because what they breathe aren't just flames, but actually balls of fire. And the reason their flames come out as fireballs is because they actually spit out this flammable liquid. It makes them one of the deadliest firebreathers because they have some serious range when they spit fireballs, unlike other dragons that breathe out just flames.

And when that fireball hits something physical – say like a tree? The liquid splatters everywhere, all of it on fire. It's like pouring burning oil or gasoline all over stuff.

The Forbidden Forest might not have been bone dry like the nature reserve, since there weren't any droughts in Scotland that year, but that doesn't really mean anything when dragons are bathing it with fire. Even water burns, when the flames are hot enough. Plus, the trees in the ForbiddenForest are not _small_. No, they're huge. When you get deep enough in the forest, the trunks are as thick as houses.

All that wood, on fire. And with the dragons going back and forth and setting it more and more aflame. No, it wasn't like a normal forest fire at all. And of course… it's not like it was just the forest either.

_\- Justin Finch-Fletchley_

 

* * *

 

 

I know the teachers tried to put it out. I think I saw one of them – maybe Flitwick – trying to make it rain or snow or something like that. And Dumbledore and a lot of the others were making these huge water spouts. It didn't really help.

The forest was on fire, and the groundkeeper's hut, and the greenhouses and then, before any of it had been put out – the castle. Sure, it was just the rooftops at the beginning, but then there was fire and smoke pouring out of the windows and yeah. It was a lot of fire.

Everyone was panicking. First the prefects tried to usher us to the castle to take cover, but then the castle was on fire and they ushered us back. There was really nowhere to go, not before someone shouted for us to go to the Black Lake, to take cover in the water. And sure, that seemed like a good idea I guess, taking cover in the water. It's just… it made us pretty damn obvious targets to the dragons.

And we were the biggest group. There were others – the Slytherin prefects were pushing their members towards Hogsmeade and then there were the teachers and the judges and whatnot. But we were the biggest group. The majority of the student population was with us, plus most of the Durmstrang students and a lot from Beauxbatons. So, of course they came after us.

The dragons, that is.

_\- Cho Chang_

 

* * *

 

 

When you think about the whole thing, it was just… just so stupid. Who thought it was a good idea? Taking four – FOUR – dragons, females at that, all of whom recently laid a clutch of eggs, to a school full of children and for what, for _what_? For a tournament, so that the champions can tempt and tease the dragons, to try and steal an egg from the clutch? What sort of lunatic thinks that is in any way a good idea?

Even at the best of times it takes up to a dozen dragon handlers to manage any one dragon. But four females, all of whom had just laid eggs? There isn't a dragon more vicious or more dangerous than a brooding female. For one, they can put on as much as two tons in weight when they're preparing to brood. And two, the instinct to protect their eggs is the strongest a dragon can have. A dragon never fights as desperately as when their eggs are in danger.

We were all outnumbered. Just about half a dozen dragon handlers for four extremely irritated females. That, the threat to the eggs presented by the champions, and the general noise and cacophony of the spectators – of course the dragons went mad.

While the others did what they could to try and hold the dragons back – which wasn't much really – I went after the eggs. They'd already trampled some of them in their panic – and the Fireball had crushed about half of hers during the actual first task. I saved as many as I could, for all the good that it did anyone. I got the Horntail’s eggs last – they were still in the arena – and then I couldn't go back because the stands were on fire…

I went to the lake, naturally. The best way to survive a dragon attack unless you can get underground and far enough away that they can't dig you out is to get under water.

In hindsight, I didn't realise that was where others would go too. I just wanted to preserve the eggs. I didn't realise it would get the dragons after so many people.

_\- Charlie Weasley_

 

* * *

 

 

And then we were in the water, all of us at least knee deep, a lot of us up to our necks, with these mad dragons coming after us, all of them breathing fire at us. Someone shoved at me and I fell face first in the water. Merlin, for a moment I thought I was going to drown and if not, then the dragons would roast us, boil up the whole lake and just eat us up. It was just a huge mess, all of it.

I think it was McGonagall who made and threw the Portkey at us. It was a rope, and she – or someone – told us all to grab hold of it, that it would take us somewhere safe. And when everything is on fire and dragons are coming at you and someone tells you that something will take you somewhere safe, you don't hesitate.

So we all grabbed the rope. Someone unwound it and everyone took hold of it, everyone who could reach it. It was a mad scramble for it – a lot of people got shoved over or knocked aside by others. There was a boy from Beauxbatons right beside me and I think I saw Viktor Krum not far from me, and so many of my classmates. We all huddled around the rope as quickly as we could, hoping that it would activate before the dragons caught us – and it _didn't._

The red one, the Chinese Fireball, spat fire at us, and though we all tried to move away from the fire, a section of the Portkey was just in between, pulled at both ends, taunt in between and above the water – and the fire hit it. The middle of the rope caught fire.

I remember just looking at it, as it burnt and frayed and snapped just as the Portkey grabbed us.

_\- Angelina Johnson_

 

* * *

 

 

So these are the actual facts.

On the 24th of November, in the year of 1994 of the Old World, the First Task of the Triwizard Tournament took place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which played host for the tournament. In the tournament, the champions of the three schools, Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, The Durmstrang Institute, and of course Hogwarts, competed for the Triwizard Cup. The First Task of the Triwizard Tournament was this: The champions were to steal a golden egg from a clutch of dragon eggs, of course guarded by the mother of the actual clutch. (Further information concerning the Triwizard Tournament and the ThreeSchools included in the appendix).

The Tasks themselves were all completed, all four champions – one from each school plus one extra, illegally added into the tournament – having achieved the goal and retrieved their eggs, when one of the dragons, the Chinese Fireball, broke loose from her restraints. No one knows how this was achieved by the dragon, only that it happened, and that in answer to the challenge she presented, the other dragons fought harder against their respective restraints and they too broke loose. In the end, all four of them flew free over the First Task Arena, and over Hogwarts' grounds.

Many things were set on fire by the dragons, most notably the Forbidden Forest and numerous rooftops of the Hogwarts castle itself. While the teachers of the three schools tried to fight the dragons and then to put out the fires, the students attempted to evacuate first to the school and when that proved unsafe, to the Black Lake, where the water might save them from the dragon fire.

Among their number were a large number of Hogwarts students, most of the Durmstrang students – who had been aiming for their ship – and a number of Beauxbatons students – who were swept along. There were also a handful of spectators from the First Task – like myself, Penelope Clearwater, Oliver Wood. And one Charlie Weasley, who was carrying the dragon eggs and aimed for the Black Lake for safety.

The evacuees were presented with a Portkey that was meant to deliver them – us – to safety. It was in the form of a length of rope – most likely a rope was chosen so that more people could use it at once. It was likely that the Portkey's destination was Diagon Alley or perhaps the Ministry of Magic. But as things stand, it delivered the evacuees to neither of those locations. A section near the middle of the rope caught fire, and so the Portkey malfunctioned.

And so, the transportation was a failure.

_\- Percy Weasley_

 

* * *

 

 

I got singed, and that was all I thought about when we landed. The fire had been put out by the Black Lake, but the burn was still there, on my shoulder – and I just stared at it, my burnt robes and blistering flesh. It was red and black and purple in the half light, and it smelled like burnt meat.

It didn't hurt at first, and I didn't feel anything. It was just there, this burnt thing on my shoulder, and it didn't even feel like anything. That's how it is with dragon fire – it's so hot that it makes the skin go numb. The pain comes after, ten minutes or half an hour later. And then it hurts.

It hurt _so much_.

It was when I looked around for someone to help that I realised that we were somewhere that we probably weren't meant to be. I was still holding the Portkey and standing knee deep in water and so was everyone else and there was nothing but water every which way we looked, water as far as the eyes could see.

Except behind us there was an island of nothing but sand and rock with some tufts of moss or grass or something like that – and mother freaking seabirds, everywhere.

Later, some of the Ravenclaws figured out where we were – in the middle of the Atlantic, thousands of miles from the nearest land mass. That didn't exactly help us then, and it doesn't really help us now either. The damn Portkey transported us to the middle of nowhere on a damned deserted island.

_\- Zacharias Smith_

 

* * *

 

 

It's about fourteen miles from north to south and eight from west to east, somewhere between 30 and 40 both in latitude and longitude in the Northwest. That's as much as the best astronomy students with us could figure out, the next night. It placed the island – and us – almost smack in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

We were stranded in the middle of the ocean by a dysfunctional Portkey, and no way off of it. I mean, sure, we tried to figure it out as best as we could. People tried to Apparate, but after Helen got splinched and lost three fingers of her right hand, we thought better of it. Someone tried to make a Portkey, but the Durmstrang boy who used it never came back, and we didn't dare try again. We shot out sparks and tried to make signals and we even tried to send letters by the sea birds, but they wouldn't even come near us.

Some of the older students who knew the Patronus charm and how to use it to send messages tried that too, but they dissipated after setting out to try and cross the ocean.

We were stranded, about a hundred of us, most of us students and under age. No way to get off, no way to send out a message, and no way to reach anyone or anything. The best thing we had for transport was Potter's broom, which he still had on him, and that wasn't much use to anyone. No one could fly for thousands of miles on a broom, not without dropping of exhaustion somewhere along the way.

The best we could do was to wait for someone to come to get us. And so we waited.

And then we got hungry.

_\- Padma Patil_

 

* * *

 

 

You can't really know how ugly people can get before you have about a hundred hungry people on a deserted island, and it turns out that a couple of them had been hiding snacks. They were such little things too. A couple of muffins, some crackers, random candies – what people had brought with them to the First Task, to snack on like one would at a theatre or a show.

There was a huge fight over them. It wasn't even a magical fight, no. People were punching and clawing at each other to try and get their share. It was a stupid, stupid thing. All of us were in the same situation, all of us were just as trapped as each other, but were clawing and tearing at each other over tiny little sweets that did nothing to help us survive. There were actual black eyes and a couple of broken fingers and several bloody noses over that one muffin. And in the end it got trampled and stomped into a pile of bird shit.

What little tiny bit of food we had, we wasted, just utterly wasted, within minutes. And afterwards we were just angry and furious and just as hungry as before, if not more. It was just bad business all around, and it didn't benefit anybody. We just got sullen and mad and started forming into groups. We probably would've started drawing lines and dividing the island into sections, if it had gone on.

Of course, it's not as if I'm any better than any of them were. I took sides too. I just happened to be on the side of the only sensible people on that island. Potter's side.

_\- Oliver Wood_

 

* * *

 

 

Of course it was Harry Potter. I say that with as much sarcasm as possible, mind you, but in the end it sort of made sense. Potter's always been just enough of an odd man for something like it. Plus, he's been getting into all sorts of weird shit ever since he entered Hogwarts.

That being said, I bet it was Granger who actually thought it up.

Potter got all four champions together and managed to talk them into first doing a head count and then making sure everyone was okay, checking for injuries, getting those who knew any first aid to treat those with burns or breaks or scrapes or whatnot. It’s a little thing, in hindsight, that any one of us could've done if we had just thought about it. But it probably wouldn't have worked as well for any of us as it did for Potter.

After all, every single one of us knew who Harry Potter was. We knew him and what he'd done and who he was, better than we knew anyone else, including the other champions. Harry Potter was a celebrity. People listened to him, the way they probably wouldn't have listened to anyone else.

So it sort of makes sense that, no matter how little some of us liked it and no matter how young he was and how there were more qualified people around, he became our leader.

\- Ernie Macmillan


	2. Chapter 2

Looking back on it, we were in a really, really bad situation. Our island was nothing like those wonderfully lush islands of adventure stories. There were no palm trees, no berries, and no animals aside from seabirds, and those didn't make for good company. There were no wild vegetables and no herbs, just some bits of mostly dried grass and moss that grew between rocks. There were some bushes, but they were withered and crooked and were of no use to anyone. The island was almost completely barren.

And we didn't do anything those first couple of days. Because we were waiting to be rescued, you see. We could stand the hunger and the thirst for a little while, we thought. We'll be rescued any moment now. Just wait and see, someone will come for us. So, outside of fighting over what we already had, no one tried to figure out how to get food, or shelter, or even fire that wasn't momentary and created by magic. Hell, the most we thought about our situation was when we needed to take a dump or who could lend you their thigh as a pillow for the night.

Sure, there were some sceptics and pessimists, but not like Potter. I guess it sort of makes sense. A guy who's gone through what he's gone through learns to expect the worst.

"It's already the second day, and it's getting late. We might be rescued or we might not be. If we just sit around and wait and then no one comes... isn't it then our own fault that we starved to death?" he said in that not so great speech he gave us. "I'd rather be thought an idiot for working so hard for no reason, than die because I didn't do anything. So, for now, let's assume that no one is coming, okay? Just for the fun of it, if not any other reason."

It was probably the boredom more than anything that made so many of us agree in the beginning. That, and yeah, the hunger. Because the first thing that Potter did, after making sure all those who were injured were taken care of as well as they could be, was to ask if anyone knew how to fish, or how to catch the seabirds.

_\- Jack Sloper_

 

* * *

 

 

Harry put us to catching the seabirds because I guess we were good at it. Just Accio a bird out of the sky, or stun it or something. It's not hard. Some others, guys and gals who knew the bubble head charm and how to cast spells underwater, he set to fishing. And you know, we actually managed to catch something. Enough to feed about a hundred people though? Well.

Magic is handy when it comes to cooking. Percy helped there, since the first thing I think he learned was how to cast cooking charms. I mean, that's pretty much the most used magic in our house, and Percy's always been a know-it-all, so of course he learned those from Mum. He and some of the older students managed to transfigure this cooking pot thing from some rocks, and then the Durmstrang students, they just whipped together this stone stove, and suddenly we had a cooking place on the island.

It was the Beauxbatons students who did the cooking though; I mean, the ugly bits of it. Apparently there is an actual cooking class in Beauxbatons, so they knew how to deal with the birds and the fish, what little we caught. Ever seen a gorgeous part-Veela pluck and gut a bird? It's a sight to behold.

In the end, though, we had some meat, and a cooking pot and, with some Aguamentis, we had a soup on the way. Percy extended it as much as he could with charms, as did the Beauxbatons students. They even managed to do something about the taste. Plus, it made people realise that Aguamenti was a thing that a lot of the younger Hogwarts students didn't know. So another pot was made just so that people could make water for those who couldn't make their own. That helped. A lot.

By the time night came, we had food. It was disgusting – don't put birds and fish in the same pot if you don't have the appropriate spices, please. And the bird was seabird so that's not exactly delicious… But still. For the first time there, we ate.

It wasn't much, but that night no one went hungry.

_\- Fred Weasley_

 

* * *

 

 

I did not like that the English boy was put in charge. Sure, we didn't really listen to him – we listened to Krum, _he_ was our leader. But Krum took orders from Potter. And Harry Potter, he was just fourteen, so what did he know about anything? But in hindsight I understand. The Hogwarts students had majority over the rest of us, and in the end it's true that Harry Potter is a celebrity. And in a time of need, you listen to those you know. I did not like it because he was young and didn't even know how to cast an Aguamenti, but…

He got us fed.

Sure, we knew the charms. We could've done it even without him. The fact is, though, we didn't. We didn't even think of it. Some had talked about going around and seeing if the birds had any nests that we could raid for eggs, but aside from that? No one thought of hunting or fishing. It's just… it's not what we do. We're witches and wizards! Only muggles scrape and scrabble for food like that.

I didn't help, then. I'm not good at attack spells and I didn't care for the fishing. And I felt that I wasn't needed, with so many others already working. Honestly, I suppose I thought myself above it. I was one of the best in my class. I was used to applying my wits to classwork and tests, and my spells were honed for optimal _presentation_ , rather than use. I was one of those in Durmstrang who were good enough to put their names in the Goblet of Fire!

The idea of using my talents, which I'd honed for mightier reasons, for something so menial?

Funny how little that matters, on a deserted island.

In the beginning, one of the biggest problems I had with Potter is that… he too worked. He did the menial tasks too, a lot of them without even using magic. Carrying rocks, minding the cooking, stuff like that, all by hand. What sort of leader gets his hands dirty like that?

_\- Petra Eszes_

 

* * *

 

 

It was the third day when we started thinking about shelters. It was the Durmstrang students who started it, with the stove they made. They'd transfigured the rocks into bricks, see, and the bricks fitted neatly together so it got us thinking. If we can use the stones to make a stove, then why not a house? Or at least some sort of shelter from the damn wind.

Granger stopped us before we could start, though. She said that we needed to plan, to make sure that whatever we built would actually be functional. To make sure that whatever we built wouldn't just collapse on us. "It's all well and good to make something with magic, but that doesn't help much if the moment we stopped paying attention to it, it just collapses on us. It needs to stand on its own power."

So we planned. Granger – because Granger is Granger – had some paper and ink with her, and we started sketching out plans and designs, to try and come up with something that would actually be feasible. A couple of the Durmstrang students sat with us, even though they didn't know much English, and some of the Beauxbatons students too. The plans got… a bit elaborate.

Our material was stone. We had nothing but stone. So it wasn't as if we could make nice sloping thatches of straw or felt or whatever people make roofs out of. We had stone. So, we had to have a stone roof, whatever we made. So that would be heavy. So… we needed pillars to keep it standing, we thought. Some of us who were good at arithmancy calculated some numbers to figure out how big the pillars had to be, and then the Beauxbatons students insisted that the pillars ought to be nice. Because what's the point in making something if you can't make it look nice, too?

Then we transfigured and floated stones around to try and get what we wanted out of them. We carved out the foundations right into the rock of the island and started building our first house. It was all done with magic, of course, but that didn't make it _easy_. No, it was hard, heavy work, trying to float a stone slab of some four tons, even with a lot of us doing the floating.

The first three buildings we put together all collapsed. It took a day each to make them too. With each failure though we got closer, and the arithmancy students got better in estimating what would work and what wouldn't. At some point, someone suggested making the individual pieces slot in, like puzzle pieces, to make grooves and notches so that they'd stick together…

On the fourth day, we had a house that didn't fall over in the wind. It was a bit like something someone might've built next to Stonehenge. But it didn't fall down, so…

_\- Terry Boot_

 

* * *

 

 

The work had kept those of us who were a part of the building process distracted for a few days, but once it was done, it struck us. The realisation that we'd, by that time, been on the island for more than five days, and were still without rescue. No one had come for us for five days. And if we hadn't started feeding ourselves the best we could on that second day… We would've died by now.

While most of us still held onto the hope that someone would come for us, the pessimism was spreading. We were stuck, thousands of miles from land, on an island that was basically a large barren rock. And we were starting to chase the seabirds away with our hunting. They were no longer coming to our corner of the island and so more and more of our food was just fish.

There was a lot of bitterness about everything. Those who did the hunting were bitter towards those who didn't and still ate the food. Those who had done the building were bitter towards those who hadn't helped them. And then those who hadn't been helping with the building were bitter about those who had being mean about letting them sleep indoors. And there wasn't room for everyone, so some people had to stay outside and those were extra bitter, even when rotations were suggested.

Everyone was cold and tired and bruised from sleeping on the rough ground, everyone was bitter about being stuck, about the food or lack thereof. Once, the older students forgot to fill the water basin, so the younger students got angry and there was a moment when I thought someone seriously thought about breaking the basin and there were threats of letting the younger students die of thirst.

We were all miserable. And can anyone really blame us? There wasn't much to be happy about. Sure we had a house now, but it was rough and the wind blew right through it and inside it was so dark that we had to have all our wands lit up, because we didn't dare add any windows and risk instability. It wasn't exactly the Leaky Cauldron.

I think we probably would've started fighting out of simple unhappiness, if Potter and the champions hadn't started banding together.

_\- Mandy Brocklehurst_

 

* * *

 

 

On the sixth day, they started giving us orders. It didn't go well at first. A lot of people argued against it, even laughed, said they'd do nothing Potter wanted them to do. That stopped very quickly though, because the first rule of our oh-so-grand island society was this: Those who don't work, don't eat.

There was still some laughing, but… we got used to the communal cooking pot of never ending fish. It was bland and annoying and we were all sick and tired of it, but did we want to starve? No we didn't. And sure there were some who said that they'd just get their own fish and do their own cooking. They'd be just fine without anyone helping. And those? Well, Potter said they were welcome to do it. But that meant they could also build their own houses while they were at it. They wouldn't be allowed into the communal ones.

If people wanted to enjoy what little luxuries we had, they had to contribute. It was simple. And considering that the next building people decided to put together was a bathing house – just a simple hut with a pool carved of stone which could be heated and cleaned with spells – well… When you've been bathing in sea water alone for almost a week, that doesn't seem like something you'd want to miss.

It isn't as if Potter started a dictatorship, though. Mind you, it wasn't a democracy either. But one of the first things he and the champions did was to go around talking with groups of people and ask what they felt like needed to be done. What they felt was needed around the island. That was how the bathing house got thought up. That, and the school.

We needed the school more desperately than we realised. Though the Durmstrang and us Beauxbatons students were mostly over age, seventeen and eighteen year olds all of us, most of the Hogwarts students – which made up the bulk of our numbers – were younger. A lot of them didn't know the bubble head charm or Aguamenti or a lot of other useful charms. And they needed to learn.

So, the tutoring sessions began, to teach the younger students just those charms.

Meanwhile, the bathing house was starting to be built, and a second communal house, and so on and so forth. The stone transfiguring charm was passed around and then a lot of people who didn't know what else to do just went around making bricks and pillars for the buildings…

I think our group of about a hundred witches and wizards – under trained as most of us were – is the biggest group of magicians ever to come together to build something. So I guess it isn't that surprising that we actually accomplished something.

_\- Phil Sardou_

 

* * *

 

 

I didn't mean to hide it. I didn't know I had it! I'd brought a bag of nuts with me to the First Task to eat – that's not so weird, everyone brought snacks, didn't they? I'd just brought nuts instead of candies because they were healthier. Besides, that bag was stolen that first day and I thought they were all gone, so I didn't exactly think to check my pockets that closely when I was pretty sure they were empty. Besides, it's probably a good thing that I didn't know I had it.

If I had, I probably would've eaten it in those first days without even thinking about it further.

It was on the eighth day on the island when I found it in the lining of my pocket – and straight away I took it to Delacour. I thought… well. I thought the cooks could do something with it, add it to the pot, and make the soup that night maybe a little less fishy. Delacour took it to Harry Potter though, and Potter took it to Neville Longbottom.

And Longbottom planted it.

Well he didn't plant it immediately. First he crushed some rocks into sand and then he took some of the compost stuff – I didn't even know we had a compost before then, or what a compost even was, but apparently we had one from the fish heads and whatnot – and I guess he made some soil, since the island doesn't really have any. And _then_ he planted it in the soil he made.

I didn't know what he and those Beauxbatons students did to it – herbology wasn't my strong suit. But there are spells even for these sorts of things – for optimal watering and for increased growth and all that. It probably wouldn't have grown at all, without them helping it along. But it did, and it grew as fast as they could make it.

You don't really think about it normally, but sunflowers are a huge, huge deal.

_\- Romilda Vane_

 

* * *

 

 

They brooded on that flower like it would hatch a golden egg, and I guess it did. I mean, at first it was of no use to anybody. They managed to grow it to maturity in a week, and got the first batch of seeds from it – somehow, they pollinated the thing without another sunflower around, but that's magic for you. Those seeds, though, they planted too, and then they brooded on those.

One sunflower was nice enough. But then, a week or so later, we suddenly had about four dozen of them. One sunflower has a lot of seeds, it turned out, a lot more than you'd think. Not all of them grew and they all needed constant care, but it's still pretty damn impressive. You can't do much with a single sunflower, but you can do a lot with four dozen.

So, a whole swathe of the island was _set aside_ for the sunflowers. Longbottom was the first of us with an actual occupation. He was our sunflower farmer, and he had about half a dozen underlings, all of them tending to our magically enhanced sunflowers. They made actual fields; they protected those fields from the wind with stone walls; they set up irrigation; they did a whole lot of stuff there. There was a bit of desperation to it, and no wonder. It was our only edible plant on the island. It was our _crop_.

And it was damn well appreciated, when they were finally satisfied with their seed stock to let the rest of us have some. After all the fish and the birds, to have some sunflower seeds… Yeah, it was welcomed. It also opened our eyes a bit, because the next time those on fishing duty went out, they brought with them whatever they found on the bottom of the ocean. And the seaweed probably saved all our lives.

You see, when your diet is only fish and seabird, scurvy is a real possibility, and some of us were already starting to feel it.

_\- Orla Quirke_

 

* * *

 

 

What we needed more than anything was wood, though. If that Hogwarts witch had had a walnut rather than a sunflower seed, it would've been a whole different thing. Wood, for fire, for building, for so many things, would've been much better. We were starting to settle when what we needed to do was to get off the damn island, and we couldn't do that without something to sail on.

No one was coming for us. We had to rescue ourselves.

But we didn't have any wood, and even though we all turned our pockets out in search of something, anything, to use, no one had any more nuts or seeds. And as good as we were all getting in transfiguring stone, it wasn't as if we could make a boat out of that.

So we were still stuck, still trapped on this damn island. We had houses now and could get out of the wind; we had more food than just fish; we even had a bathing house with an actual heated bath; and someone was actually planning a plumbing system so that we could have actual toilets, maybe even a sewer – which, granted, we really needed.

It's just that… It seemed like we were starting to settle down for the long haul. We had leaders – we had a damn government in Potter, Krum, Diggory, and Delacour. We had a rotation of jobs and duties. We were building more houses, and we were even building roads in between them in our spare time. We were planning all these things. We were, it seemed, building a civilization on this fucking island.

It's just… we should've been trying to get home, you know?

_\- Elias Dahl_

 

* * *

 

 

It wasn't home. But it wasn't bad. And by the time we'd been there for a month... We had five houses then, and no one had to sleep outside. We had a bathing house with a heated bath. And even though we didn't have soap, it was still a huge luxury, to be able to soak. We had food and we had water and the wind wasn't battering us as much anymore. It wasn't bad.

I don't know when I thought of it, but at some point it sort of sank in. That we weren't just stuck there. We weren't just surviving anymore. We had roofs above our heads which we'd built ourselves, we hunted and collected and cooked our own food. There wasn't much, but somehow we'd made it into just enough. We were _living_ on that island. We even had traditions and habits.

Every night, someone shot out sparks in the air. We had done it since the beginning – as soon as it got dark enough for someone to see them, we shot out sparks. At first they were just that, just simple colourful sparks, but we got flashier and more elaborate with it night after night, until we were basically having a fireworks display every night.

It was always sort of horrible when no one came, but it wasn't a bad sort of way to end the day – to sit down and watch the fireworks. At some point, it stopped being about someone finding us, and started becoming just about the fireworks themselves. We passed around roasted sunflower seeds and told stories and jokes – sometimes some even sang. The Beauxbatons students were the best singers – it turns out they had a music class too. And whenever you got the Durmstrang students to dance… there was nothing quite like it.

It wasn't home, but it was _something_.

_\- Laura Madley_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some random OCs thrown in there because Durmstrang and Beauxbatons...


	3. Chapter 3

 And then there was the storm. It was bad. It was… it was really, really bad.

I think it was about a month and a half after we ended up there. It blew in from the east and it looked bad even at a distance, but we thought we had time. We thought that the houses were good enough. But it moved so fast. One moment, we had clear skies and the storm front was just a dark line in the distance. And next, the wind was blowing sideways and it was raining. And then the waves started.

Our island doesn't have much elevation, you know. It's barely a meter above the water's surface at the highest point. During low tide, the island stretches out a good quarter of a mile in every direction. The storm waves that day? They had to be at least seven meters high.

We were sunk. Not immediately, but the waves washed up higher and higher until they were finally licking at the houses and then we all flooded. Despite having done whatever we could to make the houses durable, we didn't think to make them flood proof, even though really, we should've. The water came up first to our ankles and then to our knees and it kept washing higher and higher…

Worse than that, though, is that we didn't think to secure the structures against the push and pull of the ocean waves. With the waves dragging at them to and fro all day long, plus that wind, that rain, constantly battering us… Two of the houses collapsed.

Five people died.

_\- Juras Kanuz_

 

* * *

 

 

Ellen Applegate, Jarod Gilliam, Quincy Bennet, Lauren Lewis, and Sophia Slater. Hogwarts students all of them, and all of them first years. Eleven year old kids, who used to sleep together in one big pile for warmth and they didn't get out in time. The ceiling slab fell on them and before anyone could do anything…

We couldn't even get the bodies. The house collapsed on them and the waves were getting higher. All we could do was to get on top of those houses that still stood and try and stay _alive_ in that damn gale. And the storm lasted for about two, three days. I lost track of time. It just kept on and on and on… even lightning gets monotonous when it lasts long enough.

The island was a wreck afterwards. Longbottom almost died trying to keep water off the sunflowers, and he still lost over half of them. Two of the houses were basically just piles of stone brick now. And the kids… Merlin, the kids.

It was the first time people died on the island. And I guess we were damn lucky that we managed to survive for so long without losing anybody. That doesn't make it okay though. That doesn't make any of it okay. And I guess the shock of it, of losing those kids so suddenly, is what kept most of us from outright rioting. It would've been pretty easy to blame the people who'd been with the kids, or who'd built the house – why hadn't they made it stronger…

But we were too stunned.

When the storm blew over, Potter and the champions set aside a section of the island for a graveyard. We chiselled five graves, five tombs, really, into the rock of the island, and buried the kids. People said words. I can't remember any of them. It was just…

We had a graveyard, with actual _graves_. With dead people in those graves.

_\- Rose Zeller_

 

* * *

 

 

It unified the island in a way nothing before really had. For the first time, those on fishing duty went out without complaints, and everyone pitched in on the building. More than that, people started to actually think about the island as a place that needed to be defended and protected and secured.

We started thinking about things like flood barriers and elevated houses. And the houses that we still had, we started to strengthen and secure further, trying to make them flood proof. If another storm came, and the chances were that one would come at some point, we didn't want to be caught by surprise again. Nor did we want to lose anyone again.

We had one problem with all of these plans though. The lose rock around the island was starting to run out. The island was mostly rock throughout of course, but we didn't really want to dig into it and bring its elevation down further. Mining the place wasn't exactly an option, but we needed the material for building, and we needed it desperately.

I was on fishing duty that night and we were talking about it while watching the fireworks. We could expand the stone only for so long until it lost its strength. Already, the ceiling slates were a bit brittle because of the expansion charms, and if we wanted to build elevated houses or flood barriers, we needed stronger stone than that. I was thinking about all the underwater cliffs and shoals around the island, which I and all the others had seen a lot of times while fishing and it got me thinking.

So I made the suggestion for underwater mining. There was stone aplenty under the water, after all. And with the bubble head charm, one could mine it pretty much indefinitely. I mean, I didn't much like the idea of more underwater work, no one did. But what else could we do?

_\- Kenneth Towler_

 

* * *

 

 

It was hard work. The sunflower field was almost ruined by the seawater and a lot of the plants just up and died. The few we'd managed to save were battered and bruised too, and we barely managed to save them. We weren't in danger of losing the plants, thankfully. We still had enough seeds in store to start again if we needed to. But we'd worked so hard on that field, and to have it salted was like a personal blow.

And just when we were starting to finally get the seed press working to get some oil out of them.

We had a lot of volunteers helping us, though, a lot of heads were put together to try and figure out how to get the salt out of the fields, out of what little soil we had managed to create. It was one of the Durmstrang students, Anasenko, who thought it up. By reverse engineering the Aguamenti spell.

See, Aguamenti works by siphoning water from the nearby area. We have such an easy time using it around the island because we're surrounded by the ocean on all sides. There's not exactly a shortage of water here. Aguamenti takes only the water, though. It doesn't take the minerals and impurities and whatever else is in the water. That's why we get fresh water with the spell, and not salt water.

So, if there is a spell that you can use to take a part of water and leave the rest of it where it is, why can't there be another spell to do the same, but to another part of it? Why not a spell that just siphons out the salt?

Funny thing is that we came up with Salmenti just to save the sunflower field. We didn't think about how useful it would be, to be able to make our own salt like that. Not just for cooking, either.

_\- Hannah Abbott_

 

* * *

 

 

We'd gotten really good at underwater fishing by that point. The thing is, though, we only fished as much as we needed to. The reason was that we didn't have a way to preserve the food. Sure, we could create cold chambers with spells, but that's only a momentary stop gap measure and in the end more or less useless, since we could do that only for small spaces and everything would spoil eventually anyway. Salt, and having an abundance of it, changed everything.

We could _store_ food. That, even more than the new buildings and the flood barriers we were starting to put up, was a huge morale booster – to not be so dependent on that day's catch, but to have the possibility of falling back on the stores if there wasn't that much fish caught that day. For the first time, we not only had food to eat, but we had food to _spare_.

One of the new houses we built, which was built elevated so that water couldn't reach if there was another storm, was a food storage. It was a thing of beauty too – all these stone kettles, full of gutted fish soaking in brine. Plus, cooked salted fish is _delicious_.

With the possibility of preserving the food, we started fishing more too. Not so much that we scared the fish away, but enough to fill up the stores for a rainy day, as it were. We perfected the fishing methods, and we even made nets so that we could haul the catch in easier. It was intensely satisfying, after carefully picking and choosing how much to bring in, to bring in as much as we could.

We even brought in an enormous tuna fish once. It was bigger than I am and damn if it didn't taste wonderful.

_\- Léa Pépin_

 

* * *

 

 

Underwater mining and the ability to remove salt from things opened a lot of windows for us. For one, once we'd removed a lot of the rocks around the island, we realised that there was a lot of red clay about, which could be used for hundreds of things, from making pottery to actual building. We could also bring up some of the underwater ooze, and use it to make the sunflower fields bigger. There was also sand, and silica sand at that. So, we suddenly had pottery; we had bigger fields; and we even had the ability to make _glass_.

Of course, figuring out how to make those things properly took a long while. It took months really, to perfect the kilns and techniques which even with magic weren't exactly easy… but we had the materials, and we had the capabilities. There was suddenly this whole world of things we could do and make opened up before us. And as we stopped just collecting the stone and started to actually mine into the rock in the bottom of the ocean...

Of course it was years before we hit actual metals and such, but it happened eventually, and it was huge.

The clay and the sand and the soil were huge though, more than we thought. I mean, yes, we could make building materials out of the clay, and dishware too, which was definitely welcome – the stone bowls we'd been using were heavy and unwieldy. But we could make something else too, something we didn't know then that we needed.

Lovegood was the only one who did, and damn if we weren't mad at her at first for it.

_\- Marietta Edgecombe_

 

* * *

 

 

For the whole time we'd been there, Luna had been hiding these two stones with her. She used to have these earrings. They looked a lot like radishes. I thought someone probably stole them and ate them that first day. But no, she'd hidden them and they weren't radishes. They were plums. Dirigible plums.

The thing is, dirigible plums need certain temperature and soil to grow, stuff we couldn't easily supply around the island. Plus, when the fruits ripen, they literally fly off, so the only way to really harvest the fruits is to either have a net above the tree, or… a greenhouse.

We were so mad at her – everyone was mad at her – for hiding the stones she had. Because the dirigible plum is a _tree_ – it’s _wood_ , something we needed desperately. But in the end she was right to. They never would've grown before we had better soil to plant them in and a place we could control the environment.

The first greenhouse we built wasn't exactly a… pretty or secure construction. The glass we made was rough and ugly and the framework was an awkward mess of stone and ceramic. The idea was to make another one as soon as we had more plum stones to plant, though. This one was just so that we could plant the two dirigible plums and have them grow as quickly as we could make them, so that we could get more plums – and thus, more seeds – out of them.

And there, in the much cooler temperature of the greenhouse, and with the roof shaded so that they didn't get more light than they needed to, we grew our first two trees. Neville did most of the work, of course, with everyone who knew enough herbology pitching in. I think we all held our collective breath right up until they managed to make the seeds finally sprout.

Luna named them Pip and Wrack Mother, for reasons no one can figure out. The names stuck, though.

_\- Ginny Weasley_

 

* * *

 

 

Pip and Wrack Mother. It was much harder to make them grow than it was to make the sunflowers grow. The dirigible plum is a magical tree, and so it's somewhat more resistant to magic than sunflowers are, so we couldn't speed up their growth the same way we did with the sunflowers. The trees resisted it.

But they did grow a bit faster than they would have in the wild. We practically force-fed them with all the nutrients we had to give them, until they sprouted and grew. It was never going to be fast enough to be of any immediate use. And no matter how hard we tried, there was no way to make them flower and bear fruit any sooner than in half a year or so, but that's still faster than the ten or so years they would've taken naturally.

The greenhouses opened other avenues though. Our island might not have much on it, but it did have something. The moss and the grass that grew there might not be edible, but they had their uses too. The grass had enough fibre to make some sort of rope at least, and the moss could be used to make more soil, and so on. So we planted those too in the greenhouses, especially the grass to be made into more rope.

We even made a small pool and planted some seaweed, just to see if we could speed up its growth – which we could.

So the greenhouses were a more or less good idea, as hard as they were to build. The first one was a bit shoddy, but the second one was much better, with walls made of stone and clay bricks and a ceiling of glass, supported by pillars. It was there where we started to experiment with what little plants we had.

Wizards don't really have much use for sunflowers, so we didn't realise how valuable they'd really be. I mean sure, there're the seeds, and we can make oil out of them, and that's useful, yeah. But it turns out, you can eat pretty much the whole plant. The young sprouts are edible right off the ground, and the young stalks taste a bit like celery if you skin them. The older plant leaves are edible too. They made our very first salad on the island. And if you pluck the sunflower buds, they taste a bit like artichokes.

Sunflower stalks and leaves as a salad in sunflower oil, with a bit of boiled flower buds and dirigible plums on the side… It definitely beats fish.

_\- Neville Longbottom_

 

* * *

 

 

At that point it was starting to look like a, well… a town.

We had houses, more of them as we figured out how to build them better, and they were increasingly grand because we still had to build them from stone. I don't know who started adding details to the pillars or who decided that vaulted windows would be a good idea, but they looked like… well. They looked nice. They looked really nice. And once someone started planting sunflowers under the windows to brighten the place up…

I don't know if I thought of the place as home yet, though. It'd been three, four months then, and we were still homesick and still stuck and I think all of us would've still rather gone home if we could've. But we'd worked so hard on all of it. The houses, the mining, the fishing. We even had a school. We had a food storage and a really nice bathing house – someone was slowly transfiguring the walls there, carving images into it, and it was just really cool. And now we were adding more greenhouses in the hopes of planting more dirigible plums…

I guess it already _was_ a town at that point. Or a village, at least. And we could already see how it would go on, the longer we'd be there. We could see where the new houses would go. We'd set aside a place for a central square and someone was planning a fountain in the middle of it. Someone had made chairs and benches for people to sit on, and there were a couple of pavilions where you could get out of the sunlight.

We were starting to make the place _nice_. Not just liveable or functional, but aesthetically pleasing.

I suppose… it had finally started to sink in. That no one was coming for us. I mean, some people still thought that we were there only temporarily – some people still didn't contribute much, thinking it was just a waste of time. But what else was there to do, really? It kept us distracted from our homesickness, if nothing else.

And since our island was starting to turn into a town... it needed a name.

_\- Liezbeth Strater_

 

* * *

 

 

It had just started looking good, you know? We had food stores, and the houses were starting to look and feel like actual houses rather than something we'd just cobbled together out of desperation. We were actually starting to think of what to call the place. We were thinking about the future, about future crops and future meals; making more sunflower fields, farming more of them, and so on. We were starting to be, I don't know. Positive about it?

And then… dragons.

We all knew about the dragon eggs, naturally. It's hard to miss them, when there're so darn many and they're so big. Hell, for a while we were tempted to actually eat them, that was how desperate things were in the beginning. But after we had more food and we were doing the buildings, when we began to settle down, we sort of forgot about them.

We didn't think they'd hatch.

Of course, the eldest Weasley kept them warm and looked after them. He pretty much brooded on them. If we'd realised what he was doing, we probably would've beaten the crap out of him. We almost did, when the first egg hatched. I mean, it wasn't as if we hadn't had enough troubles already, right? What with the storm and the houses collapsing and those firsties dying and all. Everything was so touch and go all the time. Adding dragons – dragonets even – to that, and…

And besides, it's not as if any of us was all that fond of dragons. It was because of those damn dragons that we were stuck on the island in the first place, you know? Some of us still had scars from being burnt. The hatred was pretty much general.

I really don't know what Weasley was thinking, keeping the eggs alive. He should've killed them. Any reasonable person would've. Just let them go cold, let the dragonets die. Of course, he didn't, but anyone else on the island would've. I mean. Then. We would've done it back _then_. Nowadays…

We'd just decided to call the island _Atlantis_ when the first one hatched. And we really almost killed it. No one among us wanted to risk the thing running loose and, I don't know, burning the sunflower fields.

And then the damn thing spoke.

_\- Michael Corner_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And then there were dragons :3


	4. Chapter 4

I didn't see why I shouldn't have been able to talk. Everybody else could, and it's not as if it was difficult. Of course I know now that it wasn't that easy, that it was special – especially as things were. But back then, I did not know. So the way it shocked everyone, it surprised me.

Not that I cared. I was hungry and I wanted to spread my wings. It's so cramped in the shell, you know, and you get so bored towards the end. I wanted to get something to eat, maybe see things from aloft and then I wanted to sleep for a bit. That's pretty much all one cares about, fresh from the shell.

So I said as much and then I did as much – I took wing and to the air. It's harder and easier than you'd think, to fly freshly hatched. Sure, we can do it. But your wings are so weak in the beginning and so stiff – it takes a while to really get the circulation going. But you're also so much smaller, in the beginning, so it's not like there's much to lift when you go aloft. Truth be told, I sometimes miss being so small. It was quite handy.

Like when my Harry came after me. He was on a broom of course, and he flew with me. It was fun. We flew all over the island and he got me food from the ocean, summoning fish right out of the waves. I ate my first meal aloft, as all dragons on Atlantis do, but I was the first.

I was the very first dragon on Atlantis. I'm the oldest. I was hatched from the Chinese Fireball clutch, and I am a pure Fireball, so I might not be the biggest, or the fastest – but I was the _first_.

Afterwards, I was so heavy and tired that Harry took me in his arms and carried me back to the island. He was so very nice, even though back then none of them knew what to do with dragons. He was nice when everyone else was a bit scared and for that I love him very much.

_\- Lantica_

 

* * *

 

 

Of course she flew off. The moment the dragon egg started cracking, it was brought outside and away from what little flammable things of importance we had in the house where Charlie kept them – the eggs, that is. We thought to preserve the little clothing we had and whatnot – but that just made it easier for the dragon to fly off once she hatched. Which she did, before we'd even gotten over her first words.

Which were pretty much the same words every dragon says. "I'm hungry."

Harry was the first one of us to come to his senses. He went and grabbed his broom as quickly as he could and then he flew after her. From that we got our particular method of dragon hatching, of course, but that first time it was less about forming a bond between dragon and companion and more about keeping the little thing from torching the place. They ended up flying over the ocean, where Harry fed the thing and then brought it back.

And you have to admit, the sight of that little thing, cuddled all around him snug and happy as anything – it was sort of cute. Harry certainly seemed to think so – couldn't let go of the dragon afterwards. Well, he probably _could_. But he just wouldn't.

I understand now, of course. The feeling you get when you have a freshly hatched dragon, happy and warm and content in your arms. It takes you, it sweeps you away, to have a creature that's both terrifyingly powerful and still terribly fragile, to have them in your arms and trusting you with their life and wellbeing. It's not a small thing.

Of course he couldn't let go of her, once he had her.

Back _then_ though, we didn't see it like that.

_\- Ron Weasley_

 

* * *

 

 

Oh, the noise. There was a lot of shouting that night. Shouting at Charlie Weasley for keeping the eggs and keeping them safe, at Harry Potter for not killing the dragon mid-flight like he supposedly ought to have. And the shouting kept waking the dragon and it kept complaining – speaking and complaining. And then there was the confusion, so much confusion, about the dragonet _talking_. Talking, in perfectly understandable, downright _human_ , tones.

It was a long, long night. The only reason that we didn't kill the dragon or the eggs sometime during it was because Potter and Weasley probably would've killed us if we tried. Or at least they would've made a damn good attempt. And say whatever you want about our leader, you _don't_ challenge Potter to a duel if you can avoid it. You just don't.

Then the second egg started cracking open. Before we could decide what to do about it, it had hatched and was complaining and then it was flying off, like they all do. Potter thrust the broom at Weasley, and so Charlie Weasley became the second companion to a dragon.

It was a very confusing first hatching. We only had six Chinese Fireball eggs, because half of the clutch had been crushed during the First Task. Six is still a lot when you have no idea what to do with them, and they all hatched within the span of two days. After seeing how the eldest Weasley and Potter could manage the dragons, having that shared flight together, the rest of the Weasleys took up the task of doing the same. Weasley's youngest brother the third egg, Weasley's sister the fourth and the twins took the last two eggs.

So all of the Chinese Fireballs became, basically, Weasley dragons.

It wasn't until a month or so later when the next clutch hatched, so after that we had some time to figure out what the hell was going on. That, and the really gruesome truth about dragon keeping.

_\- Krista Sisask_

 

* * *

 

 

There were stories I'd heard, from my grandparents. About the talking dragons of Ancient China, the companions of emperors and high nobility. I'd thought they were just stories, fairy tales, like something you'd see in the Tales of Beedle the Bard. Dragons were dumb beasts, I thought. They don't talk.

And then Charlie Weasley told us his own stories. He began by telling us how… valuable dragons were. Not as creatures, you see. As _potions ingredients_. The twelve uses of dragon blood, and the hundreds of uses for hundreds of other things that you harvest from a dragon. Dragon hide itself is worth a fortune. Dragon heartstrings – literally, the muscle fibres taken from a dragon's heart – are the most commonly used wand cores around the world. A dragon, when chopped up into pieces, is worth its weight in gold.

And it was the Chinese who figured it out – that a dragon's liver, when turned into a certain type of potion, can extend a person's life by as much as fifty to seventy years. Not just a wizard's either, it works on muggles too. It is one of the most valuable potions in the world.

When you have that, when you know _all of that_ … wouldn't it be a bit of a hindrance, to have such a valuable thing be, well, sentient?

Of course even Weasley didn't know that for _sure_ , but he had suspicions. There were old dragon keeper stories, about people breeding dragons for their own pleasure; about how if you kept a dragon egg around you, and talked to it, the dragon might come out of the shell speaking your language. Dragon eggs in sanctuaries were _never_ kept around people, though. They let the dragons brood on them. So that there'd be no chance of them learning human languages.

And after that, once they hatched, they were hobbled in a variety of ways. By being fed only a little in the beginning so that they stayed small. There were also intentionally spread stories about how dragons needed to be fed alcohol fresh from the shell, which on dragons has about the same effect if not worse as if you fed a new-born baby alcohol. The dragons were kept in line by chains and sometimes their wings were hobbled completely – sometimes, they were crippled. And more often than not they were abused.

"To keep them manageable and controllable for the safety of the common people," Charlie Weasley said bitterly.

Dragon sanctuaries, it turned out, aren't sanctuaries. They're hatcheries, they're breeding pens, and, in the end, they're butcheries. And they make a fortune in trading potions ingredients. So… a sentient dragon capable of expressing its thoughts and feelings and objecting to his or her treatment wasn't in their best interest.

_\- Sue Li_

 

* * *

 

 

So we had six dragonets, all of them perfectly capable of talking and understanding. Potter's Lantica, Charlie Weasley's Septimus, Ron Weasley's Pretty Beast, Ginny Weasley's Lady, Fred Weasley's Gideon and George Weasley's Fabian. And despite all our worries, they weren't uncontrollable, nor were they exactly monstrous. They did not go around setting things on fire, and they did not run rampant eating everybody. Mostly they just ate and slept.

And they ate a lot. Each could eat its body weight in fish twice or thrice a day in the beginning. And sure they were pretty small at first, but they grew like it was a race. They could put on inches of length every day. It definitely put our fishers and cooks under strain at first, before they learned to hunt for themselves. And even then it was best for everyone that all their meals were extended with charms, and by turning any fish we got into soup.

In the end, no matter how some people disliked it, we couldn't kill them. We couldn't even contain them. For one, their companions wouldn't stand for it and for two… they were thinking creatures. More than that, they were _smart_ , and they learned so fast those first few months. And as they got bigger, they were actually helpful. They could carry and fetch loads that would've taken two or three wizards to float. And they were especially helpful with the fishing and mining.

It's much easier having a dragon haul in the day's catch in a net, than it is to try and float it to Atlantis yourself. They could do the same with the stone too, and whatever else was scavenged from the ocean bottom. And they didn't mind the work, either. Why would they? Atlantis was their home too.

We were almost used to the idea of having them around. And then the second clutch hatched. The Common Welsh Green one. All fourteen eggs of it.

_\- Wayne Hopkins_

 

* * *

 

 

To think of it now, it still makes my head spin. If the Fireballs were sprightly, try and imagine the Welsh Greens. Even the pure Welsh Greens are fast. And so small too. The Welsh Green eggs are about the size of an ostrich egg, a little smaller even. And then you have fourteen of them, all hatching in quick succession. One after another, hatching, taking off to the sky, and flying off.

Of course we didn't manage to put handlers on all of them, not when we only had one broom and they were hatching in two's more often than not. I believe people call it a dragon _going feral_. We didn't, of course. Sure we'd gotten the basic grasp of dragons and _handlers_ and how a dragon impresses on the first person who feeds it or is kind to it. But to go feral wasn't something that was in our vocabulary. For us, they were just dragons that did not take to a human, and that was all.

The three _feral_ dragons flew off for a while and then they flew back again when they failed to find food – and then they ate with the rest and that was it. It wasn't really as if they could _go_ anywhere, after all. They were just as stuck on Atlantis as were we.

We weren't really worried. We had the six juvenile Fireballs, after all, each them growing rapidly both in size and understanding. In them we had our example of dragons and their intelligence. Though they were a bit slower than the flighty little Greens, they could still manage the smaller beasts, even the so called _feral_ ones. And so, as long as the _ferals_ didn't do anything stupid, we didn't much mind that they didn't take to a human companion. They were still companionable enough and didn't mind doing chores, so it was fine.

I was one of the volunteers for a dragon companion, and that was how I got my Mithra. Mind you, I fell off the broom while feeding her, but it was alright. She loved me anyway.

_\- Parvati Patil_

 

* * *

 

 

So is a dragon sentient, or is it _sapient_? There is a difference, after all, and for a while we wondered about it. They were definitely intelligent and smart and they could learn to both understand and behave. If you taught them early enough, they could even learn how to read, if the text was big enough, and count. They didn't run wild by nature. They did not eat everything in sight. And though they definitely _could_ all breathe fire, it wasn't as if they breathed it indiscriminately at everything.

Firebreathing is a weapon of offence and self-defence. A dragon doesn't just use it at random and waste it.

So, were they sapient? After some talking, we had to test it. It was half an intellectual exercise and half an actual serious concern. If a dragon could make moral choices, if he could have ethics, if he could act on those ethics… On a small island of limited resources, full of fairly fragile _people_ , that's something that's pretty important to know.

So, we set up a bit of an exam for them, a series of hypothetical questions at first. Just basic theoretical situations with a moral choice to be made – if this happened, what would you do; or if you had to choose between this or that, which would be your choice. The results were very interesting. And surprising.

A dragon with a companion will _always_ put the companion above everything else. If they had to choose everyone on a sinking Atlantis, or their companion alone, they'd choose the companion without hesitation. But if the companion is not one of the choices, then they would go for the highest gain and greatest benefit to the whole.

The answers vary with the breed, of course. When forced to choose between saving a person or the food stores for example, Greens are more likely to save people than food, because they don't think that far ahead and they think somewhat clannishly. Fireballs are more likely to project in time – what are the chances of getting more food in the future? If there is no prospect for more food, then they'll save the food and not the people. Short Snouts refuse to believe that there is no way to save both, and always try to figure out a third way if they can.

Horntails have some trouble thinking in hypothetical at all, especially when the hypothetical is so different from reality. But if told, right now, to either do one thing or another as things stand, then they tend to go for personal benefit more than the rest. But more often than not, their personal benefit tends to run along with the general good of the whole.

Are dragons sapient? Are they capable of making wise and moral choices, rather than just intelligent ones?

I think they are.

_\- Jean-Ives Pentelle_

 

* * *

 

 

So we became a human-dragon society. It wasn't easy, not in the least, and there were a lot of complainers. I mean, they had to be fed. And by the time that all four clutches had hatched, we had all told forty three dragons. Six Fireballs, fourteen Greens, thirteen Short Snouts, and ten Horntails. And Horntails require a lot of feeding. But there were benefits.

Having dragons fetch and carry made fishing and mining easier. They were a huge help with the building too, hauling loads of stones to and fro much more easily than we could by levitating them. Sure, we had to amend the building plans a lot to fit the dragons in – the streets had to be made much wider – but that wasn't hard seeing that we didn't have more than a handful of buildings before then.

The first time the dragons hauled in a _whale_ , though… well, they definitely paid for the board then. It was a Humpback whale, not even close to mature, but it was still enormous, bigger than the largest of our dragons was at that point. They'd brought it down – or up, as it were – in a group, and there were a lot of burn marks and scratches. But it was still the biggest _catch_ we'd ever had and definitely the most useful in a while.

I mean, yeah, a lot of people complained about it – about whaling and how terrible it was and yeah, we all knew. But the meat easily fed all the dragons – and us – for _weeks_ , and the oil and the blubber were definitely useful. If not for any other reason than for the _soap_ we could make from it.

So while it was a bit difficult to get used to the dragons, it definitely wasn't impossible. Dragon's aren't that different from any other magical creature, really. And they're definitely nicer to talk to than centaurs.

And then of course the Weasleys went and taught their dragons to play Quidditch. And my Pyrr had to join, of course.

_\- Seamus Finnigan_

 

* * *

 

 

I understand it's not exactly like the Quidditch they have in the old world. As it was though, I can't really say I understand the rules of _that_ Quidditch anyway. Whatever would you need four balls for, and why is one of them worth so much, and why would you want balls chasing you around? It's bad enough that there are other dragons chasing you about.

I prefer our Quidditch, I think. Even in the beginning, before we had the stadium and the goals and the actual rules, it was so much fun. It was _exciting_. It was also, after the fireworks every night, the first actual entertainment on the island, so I suppose it was a big deal even to the humans, even though they couldn't join.

Objectively, I can see it having more than one benefit for us. We Atlantean dragons aren't much like the dragons from the continents, especially not much like the ones from Europe. We're not trained for war or fighting. It was never an issue on Atlantis, since it was just us and we were more worried about survival and food and things like that, not about… fighting other nations.

Quidditch gave us something though, a type of training. Not in war or fighting maybe, but competing, and facing against other dragons and outwitting them. We made teams and we rotated our teammates, and once the rules came into play and we started to manage teams by weight classes and such so that the teams weren't so horribly imbalanced… we got pretty good at out manoeuvring each other. Not maybe in formations like the soldier dragons do in Europe and other places, but definitely in teams.

Plus Quidditch opened up other athletic pursuits. Of course the Greens already had races every now and then for fun, but we started to actually compete. We competed about speed and manoeuvring, and weight lifting too, and in firebreathing though only out over the ocean and never on the island. Things like that. It was an easy, safe way to fight and compete, so the humans encouraged it. It was a way to get any dangerous impulses out safely, I suppose.

It doesn't hurt that it was quite fun – and gave one something to gloat about over the others. And I'm not saying that just because I'm the reigning fire-spitting champion the third year in a row now, either.

_\- Septimus_

* * *

 

Atlantis, the society of wizards and dragons. You know, we named it Atlantis because… well. It was funny. And people thought Atlantis was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean anyway, so it sort of fit, I guess. But then… it sort of started to actually seem like a mythical place.

It got harder and harder to think of ourselves as lost, or to think of the island as a _deserted_ island, you know. It wasn't deserted. We were living there, and we were even starting to prosper. It had been almost half a year and we were doing well. It was, by then, home for us. And yeah, I know, a lot of us were still homesick, but going back from what we'd built, what we'd made? It was starting to seem less and less likely.

Especially with the dragons. How do you go back to a normal life, after you've lived next to talking _dragons_?

Six months and no rescue. Why not? Why hadn't they come for us, what was taking them so long? Surely there were ways to find people, especially such a large group of people? There were so many kids, a lot of us the kids of important people even. Krum and Potter, for Merlin's sake. If no one else, they ought to have come after them. Why hadn't they? What was keeping them?

I think we were starting to suspect it, by then. Of course we had no way of knowing, but… we were definitely suspecting that something wasn't quite right. It was just taking too damn long.

It wasn't until about eight months in that we finally figured out how badly lost we really were. That was when we finally saw other people. When we saw the ship.

_\- Susan Bones_


	5. Chapter 5

It was understandably very confusing. There were some half-bloods and muggleborns – not that such terms meant much anymore – among us and enough of them knew enough of the muggle world to know that the ship was… wrong. Because it was a sailing ship. Not, that is, a modern sailing ship. Not at all.

It was all wood and sails and ropes and bits of iron. With three masts and sails to spare, turning awkwardly and slowly on the waves. It was old – except it wasn't. It was new _then_. In that time, it was new.

We panicked a bit, which makes sense. We naturally thought they'd be muggles, so… there was a bit of a scramble. First to decide what to do, how to approach them, how to make contact and, once that contact was made, what to do from there. Though the ship's design confused us, it was still a ship. A way to get off of the island and maybe even… back home.

It was still far away, but it was coming for us, so we had a bit of time to act. The dragons, though they weren't happy about it, were hidden – sent to the other side of the settlement where the buildings would hide them, all of them on foot so that they couldn't be seen at a distance. They complained and whined and did not like it one bit, but they understood and went. Then we hid all the obvious signs of magic – not that there were many. Then, for extra measure, we transfigured all our clothing.

It's not as if we'd been wearing robes until then, though. It's hot on our island. We're not that far from the equator, so it's never actually cold where we live. A lot of the guys went around shirtless and the girls had turned their clothing into skirts and tops long ago. It was just easier that way, especially after we'd all tanned to the point where we didn't get sunburnt much anymore. Still, we made an effort.

Then we chose who would talk with the muggles.

_\- Anne-Laure Valluy_

 

* * *

 

 

Of all of our leaders, Potter was the only one with any experience with muggles, having been raised by them. He took Charlie Weasley with him, because Weasley is the oldest of us, and then he selected one Durmstrang student and one Beauxbatons student to go with him – Sofia Hertzfeld who could speak eight languages and Máeva Léger who knew seven. With them, he had as good a set of translators as we were going to get, back then.

The ship anchored just about half a mile off the shore, and then it sent out a little boat, with about eight or so men in it. They came to us under a white flag. But as they came… it just got more confusing. They had to row the boat – there was no motor on it. And it was wooden too, from end to end, all wood, only being lacquered at best. And their clothing, their _hats_.

They came on shore and Potter met them. I was sticking near the others, but we were all about close enough to see. To see their swords and guns and confused expressions – and then, the obvious confusion from our side. It was a very tense half an hour, while Potter and Weasley talked with the men.

We were all holding our breaths, watching them. We were all watching and thinking and pondering. And we were worrying. Because the muggles looked like… something from another time entirely. Except, of course, they weren't.

 _We_ were.

_\- Anthony Goldstein_

 

* * *

 

 

Our first contact with the world outside Atlantis – the world we'd only started to realise wasn't like what we thought it was – was with a whaling ship. She was called _Mary_ and her captain was Kurtis Elliston, and both called North Carolina their home. So, in the end, the translators weren't necessary. But they did have a certain sort of effect, not that we realised it then.

The whalers had come to the area because it wasn't that far from the breeding grounds of the Humpback whales. And they'd come for _us_ because they'd seen the fireworks the previous night. They thought they'd seen a signal flare and that they'd find a ship in distress, not an island fully inhabited. They were even less prepared to see us than we were to see them.

Honestly, I think they were a bit scared of us. I didn't figure it out then, mind you, but I thought about it a lot later on. See, the whalers had seen the island before at the same time last year, and it had been a barren rock. And now?

We build our houses out of stone, with flat stone roofs, and we support them with pillars. And for a while then, people had been transfiguring them all fancy. And the stone we use is mostly limestone, which we polish and shine with charms. It doesn't look that different from marble. Already back then the pillars were all carved in those ancient roman styles, the windows and doorways were vaulted and engraved. In one of the newest buildings, someone had actually transfigured all the walls full of pictographs and added dragon statues on the corners of the rooftop.

In a word, our settlement doesn't look new. It looks ancient. It looks like something that took decades, if not centuries, to build. And finding that, on a previously barren and empty island? I would've been a little scared too. Plus there was me, in all my fourteen year old glory, with Charlie at my side as well as Sofia and Máeva… all of them older than me, and yet with me in charge?

And sailors, I understand, are very superstitious folk. Our clothing, our cleanliness, and our own confusion definitely didn't help.

So it took some effort to keep them from running away from what they probably thought was some fae or siren enchanted apparition.

_\- Harry Potter_

 

* * *

 

 

And then we learned what year it was – or as we thought then, what the year the sailors _thought_ it was. 1799. Specifically, May 16th of 1799.

Of course we didn't believe them. We thought that they were liars at first, or confused somehow, or some sort of actors – muggles do that, you know. Or did in the old world. They put up these acts like it was pastimes. We thought this – the whalers, the ship, their clothing, all of that – was something like that. Either that or they were a ghost ship which was much worse.

Getting any help from these people in getting off of the island was out of the question anyway. For one, they refused outright when Potter hinted at it, and for two… I don't think any of us would've even _wanted_ to get on that ship, not when there was every chance of it not even being real. What Potter thought about the supposed time and the sailors, I don't know, but he's not stupid anyway. And he's one sly son of a dragon, when he wants to be.

I'm still not sure how he managed to steer the conversation into stores and goods and whatnot; how he managed to bring up the idea of trading. Maybe it was the sailors who did it. Somehow, though, they ended up talking about things like food and trade goods and in the end we did our first trading with the sailors.

It turns out salt is not a minor trade good. Neither is fresh water, especially the sort of fresh water that we can produce, perfectly pure and free of contaminants. We had that on our side and it was more than good enough for trading, especially when compared to what _we_ wanted and needed.

_\- Máeva Léger_

 

* * *

 

 

The sailors left almost as fast as they'd come, after the trading was done. Harry ordered a fireworks display to send them off with, though the ones shooting out the fireworks had to do it in the cover of the buildings so that the sailors couldn't see who was sending the sparks into the air. I think he did it because of how freaked out the sailors were, and he just decided to make it worse. It was actually kind of hilarious – never seen a ship set sail so fast.

Then he showed us what we'd gotten in return for the salt and fresh water we'd filled their barrels with. A handful of dried apple slices, a small satchel of raw barley, and a few potatoes.

For a moment we thought he had gone mad. Then we got it. Because the apple slices all had seeds in them – he picked them by hand, and the barley of course were already seeds. And it took just a few charms to turn the potatoes into seedling potatoes.

Of course Harry got other things too. A couple of old American newspapers, to be exact. They were mostly about events in the South Carolina area and most of it was meaningless to us, but there were some references to general events too. There was a mention of Napoleon and the Battle of the Nile the previous year. It was just a mention, little more than a gag added to another news story. But it was enough.

Except of course it turned out that the purebloods among us had no idea what any of it meant. Trying to explain it to them was fun, and sort of terrifying.

_\- Dean Thomas_

 

* * *

 

 

In the end, though, the supposed year the sailors thought it was didn't matter much to us. For one, we didn't believe them, and for two, it didn't change anything. They refused to take passengers and so we were still stuck on Atlantis. Or as much stuck as you can be in your own home, anyway.

After the ship had gone, we more or less went back to business as usual. Except not, because what we'd gotten in the trade took all our effort. I think everyone on the island was invested in those apple seeds – and the barley and the potatoes too, though to a lesser degree. It was the apples that we all wanted. Both for the apples themselves and for the wood. As much as we'd tried, we hadn't managed to make the dirigible plums grow fast enough to be of much use, and with Pip and Wrack Mother being the only dirigible plum trees that had yet grown to maturity…

The apple is different. It was a magicless tree and besides, we didn't need to grow them in a greenhouse. Though Longbottom and the others did start them out in a greenhouse just to make sure that the seeds grew as well as could be hoped, the actual trees were planted _outside_.

And with a couple dozen people all chanting spells, we could grow them from a seed to a tree inside a week. Which is pretty much what we did, for about four months straight. Though of course it's not all we did. To plant the seeds we first needed soil for them. And there were the potatoes and the barley too. We wanted to get some produce out of those as well, so… Well, for a while every person and dragon on the island became a farmer. We even rushed the younger students through their herbology tutelage so that they could learn the right spells and join the effort.

And it paid off. A few months later, we had an apple orchard, and several barley and potato fields. Harvesting the fruits of that labour was… indescribable.

You never appreciate an apple-pie quite as much as you do when every single ingredient is raised and made by your hand. Sure it wasn't apple-pie like the ones in the old world – we had no eggs or milk or yeast, or sugar… it was basically just barley flour, sunflower seed oil, and a lot of apples. But it was still delicious.

_\- Elanor Branstone_

 

* * *

 

 

It's still strange for me to think that other lands aren't like Atlantis, that other people can't do what people here do. We were still so very young when our humans went and completely transformed the island. It went from mostly empty and barren rock into what one might call a garden, in just a few short months. We thought then that it was the normal way of being, so we didn't think much of it.

We did our part of the work, of course. Every field and orchard had to be protected, flood barriers were erected everywhere, and of course the soil had to be made and spread around – and for that, a lot of underwater scavenging was done. That too, I now know, isn't how things _work_ elsewhere. Most people can't just go underwater and bring the ooze up to make soil out of it. But that was just part of the norm for us. The wizards brought the ooze out, floated it into sacks, and we carried it to shore, where it could be desalinated and mixed with sand and clay and compost and whatnot. And then we made fields out of it.

It made our people happy, to have the trees and the grain and the vegetables grow, so it made us happy too. Especially after they started automating things with irrigation systems and runes which, eventually, meant that we needed to spend less time farming and could do other things.

Then, once we started getting a good yield out of it, they started adding potatoes into our food, and I suppose it wasn't bad. It extended the food further, which in time increased our food stores. It is good, to have a surplus of food. It does good things to people.

_\- Lady_

 

* * *

 

 

It happened at about the same time, really. The first pregnancy on Atlantis, and the first real guest we had. Cho Chang was the first witch to get pregnant on our island and really, we were lucky that it didn't happen sooner. She'd just announced it to us, when the dragons spotted the second ship on the horizon.

It was another whaler, of course. _Mary_ and her crew had spread rumours about Atlantis among the whaling community, I guess. Atlantis, and the rumour that we practically gave away salt for nothing. Salt, it turned out, was pretty valuable.

So, the dragons hid again, which was easier this time, what with the apple trees all over the place now, and Potter went to talk and trade with the whalers. Two barrels of salt for some books and newspapers, and for seeds. I think the whalers thought they were ripping us off big time, but the seeds were worth all the salt. They were mostly vegetable seeds, carrots and onions and such, with some lettuces and herbs thrown in and, best of all, one of them had flax seeds. Potter traded a whole barrel of salt and threw a small stone statue of a dragon on top, just for the flax seeds.

And for a good reason. Though we could make some rope out of the native grasses of the island, the rope only worked because we practically soaked it with enchantments. Flax was a different thing. Not only could it make actual rope that needed no enchantments, it made thread. It made _linen_.

Of course we had the clothing we'd worn when we'd gotten stranded, and we could keep it clean with spells and fix if with enchantments. Still, even magic can't extend the life of clothing endlessly, and it’s one thing to transfigure clothing to suit you, and another to actually _make_ them fit.

It was around then, I think, that a lot of us started to settle into actual occupations. There were our farmers, of course, led by Longbottom, but there were also others. Those who were better at building mostly did that and little else. A couple of the people did nothing but fish, having sort of settled to the task. Now, with the possibility of linen, we even had potential seamstresses…

Of course, turning flax into linen is not a small process. But it's wondrous how easy magic can make these things.

_\- Penelope Clearwater_

 

* * *

 

 

The second ship sort of confirmed what the crew of the first one had told us, and more. Because of the newspapers that we got from them, one had an illustration of a dragon hauling cargo, and the tale about some shipping company and its dragon couriers.

It was a surprise, and I know a lot of people didn't believe it at first… But it explained a lot of things, especially the fact that no one had come for us. Also, it wasn't completely beyond the realm of possibility before we had that proof, either. Portkey malfunctions could be… dramatic. If there'd been time travel via malfunctioning Portkey before, though, we'd never heard of it. And of course we wouldn't have, considering that our Portkey had thrown us not only to the wrong place and wrong time, but to the wrong reality altogether.

Potter was one of the first to believe and one of the first to start acting on it. Because, unlike a lot of us, he had had some muggle tutelage and he knew enough history to make him worried. He and those who knows any muggle history put their heads together to try and figure out the time and the events, past and future, and how dragons did or didn't affect it. Napoleon and the Battle of the Nile, I think, were their guiding light. Or maybe their warning signal.

Even when the rest of us accepted that we might be in the past of an alternate reality, we didn't really understand the significance of our being there, and the sheer importance of our position. We were smack in the middle of the Atlantic, between Europe and the Americas. And sure the island had been there before, but it'd been inhospitable before we'd come along. Inhospitable and of use to no one. We'd turned a barren rock into a liveable island. Granted, no one but a wizard could live here. But the fact remained.

The sheer strategic and trade value of our location… it was immeasurable. And we were in the middle of the European colonial period.

_\- Sofia Hertzfeld_

 

* * *

 

 

It's hilarious to think about now. We called the island Atlantis because it seemed apt. Once we realised that we were in another world… The thing is, the island probably _is_ Atlantis. Or at least it's the same island which in our world was Atlantis. In this new world, it was just never inhabited by wizards, and so it never sank. It wasn't inhabited by anyone here, before we arrived. And the reason we _did_ land here, specifically on this particular island… was probably because it _was_ Atlantis.

Not that it made much difference then.

These are the facts that we had to deal with. One, we were in a different world in a period where people did a lot of warring over land. Two, we were stranded and probably always would be, and Atlantis was probably going to be our home for the rest of our lives. Three, one of us was pregnant and thus a constant reminder that it wasn't just _we_ who were stuck. It was also our children and future generations. And four, our position was pretty valuable, and anyone who did any sort of trading over the seas – like the British Empire, for example – would see that. And probably do something about it.

"We've two choices. Either we live here, or we don't," Potter said. "And if we're going to live here, we're going to have to _live_ here."

And living meant defending the land we were living on, because we probably weren't going to be so lucky as to be left alone by all the people waging wars all over the place in this time. Atlantis was prime real estate. Someone would want to take it and make use of it, even if they really couldn't. This place isn't liveable unless you know Aguamenti and Salmenti. But they didn't know that. All they knew was that some upstart group of random people had settled and built a habitable, prosperous town in the middle of the ocean.

If we stayed, we would probably have to fight for the right to stay.

 Obviously, we chose to stay.

_\- Kevin Entwhistle_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it for this part. Thank you for reading :3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The ever-changing tide](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4014733) by [Sann](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sann/pseuds/Sann)




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